How to Write a Self-Evaluation

Performance evaluations are an important part of your professional life. They give you an opportunity to showcase and celebrate your accomplishments, while providing space to grow through constructive feedback. Even though the phrase “constructive feedback” can induce feelings of anxiety or fear, when in the hands of a good leader, it is an effective tool in identifying blind spots and areas to improve upon to reach your next career milestone.?

Performance evaluations can take on many forms (1 on 1’s, 360 feedback, etc.), but no matter the process, clear communication on what you have accomplished and, sometimes, what you plan to do is critical to maximizing the feedback. It also provides you (the writer) some level of control in a stressful (and sometimes unclear) process. The focus of this piece is to provide a framework to effectively communicate accomplishments in performance evaluations.?

1. Gather Information. Gathering your accomplishments is the most critical step in this framework, and should never begin when the performance review cycle starts. Rather, this step should start at the beginning of each year and become an intentional part of your monthly/quarterly routine. When documenting your accomplishments, make sure to capture your specific contributions and how the outcome impacted your stakeholders. More specifically, the outcome’s impact should be quantified (e.g., money generated or money saved). Alternatively or in conjunction, you should seek feedback from major stakeholders starting with customers who received your service or product. For example, a Manufacturing or Process Engineer’s customer may be their Operation or Quality counterparts. Gaining their viewpoints will give you a different perspective, allowing you to refine the impact or the objective to be more inline with their priorities. The outcome of this step is to have a list of accomplishments that are quantified and tied back to your stakeholders.?
2. Work Backwards. After compiling your accomplishments, you will likely need to narrow them down to the top few. But how do you know which ones to keep? To help with prioritization, work backwards from the goals cascaded down from leadership. If an accomplishment directly impacts a goal, then the accomplishment should be used in your performance review. If an accomplishment impacts two or more goals, tie the accomplishment to the goal that has the highest priority (covered in the next step) or needs more supporting evidence. In contrast, if an accomplishment does not tie back to a goal, then mark it as “nice to have” and set aside. At the end of this step, all of your accomplishments should map to a single goal or be in the “nice to have” group.?
3. Organization. After mapping all of your accomplishments to a single goal, organize the goals by importance. Goal importance can be driven by the goal’s visibility level or a company’s culture. An example of the former is, the VP level goals typically have a higher importance and impact than team level goals. Meaning, the VP level goals should be documented before the team level goals. As an example of the latter, some companies place a significant importance on safety goals versus their cost counterparts. In this case, the safety goals should be before the cost goals in your performance evaluation. Once goals have been organized, accomplishments under each goal should be organized by their impact statement. At the end of this step, you should have goals organized by priority with each goal’s accomplishments organized by impact.?
4. Content. Once the performance evaluation is structured, how the content is written or presented is dependent on the leaders themselves. Some leaders are fine with bullet points while others want statements. Note, in larger companies, your entire leadership chain could be involved with your evaluation to various degrees. Keeping this in mind, your performance evaluation needs to be easy to read and understood by your direct leader. In the event you are up for monetary rewards, your boss will become your biggest advocate, so you need to understand how best they receive information. At the end of this step, you should have a performance evaluation that outlines how you have contributed to your company’s goals through accomplishments that are organized by impact and that is easily consumed by your direct leader.?

Connor Weston, MBA is currently the SWE Early Career Professionals Affinity Group Professional Development co-Chair. She holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and Economics from Iowa State University. In 2022, she graduated with her MBA from University of Iowa. Connor has worked as Manufacturing Engineer and Operations Supervisor at Caterpillar. Recently, she made a career switch and began working at Amazon as a Product Manager. While at Amazon, Connor has worked in Data Privacy and has recently moved to Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) org.

About SWE Early Career Professionals Affinity Group (ECP AG):

The mission of the SWE Early Career Professionals Affinity Group is to aid in the recruitment and development of early career professionals, and to facilitate their engagement with and participation in SWE. By providing a forum for networking, professional development, and opportunities to promote diversity of thought, the ECP AG aims to empower early career professionals to succeed professionally and personally. Collegiate seniors, graduate students, and individuals in the first 10 years of their career are encouraged to join.?

To learn about upcoming ECP AG events and activities, join the newsletter mailing list, Slack, and LinkedIn. If you are a SWE member, be sure to opt-in to receiving ECP AG emails by logging into your SWE account on swe.org > My Information > scroll down to Communication Preferences > click on Change in the right corner > ensure the checkbox is ticked next to “OPT IN Early Career Profession AG Emails” > Save.?